In my view this is a smart way to flip the script the Russians and the Chinese employ. They stress that they never colonised the continent, a claim already put forward in the 1960s when Zhou Enlai and Leonid Brezhnev visited the continent.
AuthorFrank Gerits
Frank Gerits is an Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University and a research fellow at the International Studies Group of the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
He has held positions at New York University (2015), the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa (2016) and the University of Amsterdam (2017). In 2020, 'Visions of African Unity: New Perspectives on the History of Pan-Africanism and African Unification Projects', a volume he edited together with Matteo Grilli was published with Palgrave Macmillan. His book, 'The Ideological Scramble in Africa: How the Search for Anticolonial Modernity Shaped a Postcolonial Order (1945-1966)', will be published with Cornell University Press in 2022.